What Kindle Wants

Kindle, as you can tell from the ad above, wants to be held and read, fondled and listened to, caressed and loved. And it has gotten what it wants. Last week, Amazon announced that the Kindle is now the thing that it has sold the most of, surpassing Harry Potter No. 7—news followed quickly by Barnes & Noble’s announcement that the Nook is now their top-selling thing. The news made me feel like I’m not up to the challenges technology poses. Am I supposed to understand the desire of the Kindle to be held and read? Or the humans who prefer them to books? When I read a book all the way through to the end, I want the evidence stuffed and mounted on my bookshelf. My suspicion is that people who prefer e-readers use them primarily to read Harlan Coben, and are happy to be able to delete the physical evidence.

Searching for answers, I picked up “What Technology Wants,” the new book by Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired magazine, which presents a theory of technology, or “the technium,” as “a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies.” He has little to say about the Kindle specifically, but I did find passages that helped to explain my lack of interest in e-readers. Technology is evolving (at the speed of human invention), and two things it is evolving toward are ubiquity and specialization. Eventually, Kelly writes, all technologies will “share the universal intelligence of the network”—a process which has begun in the Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc.—but they will be much more suited to individual needs:

As display and battery technology catches up to chips, the interface to ubiquitous intelligenation will diverge and specialize. Soldiers and other athletes who use their full body want large-scale, enveloping screens, while mobile road warriors will want small ones. Gamers want minimal latency; readers want maximum legibility; hikers want waterproofing; kids want indestructibility…. With the advent of rapid fabrication (machines that can fabricate things on demand in quantities of one) specialization will leap ahead so that any tool can be customized to an individual’s personal needs or desires.

This makes me happy, because what I as a reader need and desire is a technology with pages and a cover and heft that can be marked up and placed on a bookshelf and kept forever. I wonder if technology will ever evolve itself into something like that?

There is one thing about the current tech revolution that I am enjoying: some of the technoliteratur that's been published recently. I wouldn’t necessarily read a “straight” info or policy book about the Internet and its attending technologies, but I love books like Kelly’s (and Jaron Lanier’s and William Powers’s) that give explanations of these things in dreamy, slightly unhinged language, providing visions of what tech could become and how we might respond to it and what it says about us. I like these books even when I don't agree with them entirely, because they are literary and inspiring and sometimes a bit spooky (like good sci-fi). People always talk about the usefulness of certain technologies—to me, a technology is useful if you can make good literature out of it. These recent books are surprising—it's almost as if tech writing were evolving, like technology itself, to suit my personal needs and desires.